Thinking Ethnographically about Culture, State, and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Western Guatemala

 

John Watanabe - Dartmouth College  

 

Abstract: This paper draws on administrative records and land titles from late nineteenth-century Guatemala to reconstruct interactions between government officials and Maya Indian communities in the western highlands where I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork. Substantively, it uses these archival sources to explore the roots of Guatemala's ethnic divisions and state violence in the twentieth century. Methodologically, it asks how we read archival sources ethnographically. Theoretically, it contends that, postmodernist angst aside, culture remains an indispensable analytical tool in teasing apart the conflations in overly-hegemoniacal preoccupations with state power and overly-imagined national communities, especially in violently multiethnic societies like Guatemala.

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